Tim Grobaty: Impending graduation reminds us that the best years of our lives may no longer lie ahead

We were with our daughter at the Starbucks in Albertsons Tuesday morning, because coffee tastes better when it comes from a giant and faceless corporation, when we noticed a couple of cakes decorated for graduation.

That's when it dawned on us, if "dawned on us" means the jarring epiphany felt like being clamped in the jaws of an orca, that our daughter Hannah had roughly the shelf life of a cake remaining in her high school years.

That'd be great. That would mean we still have more years left of Dad's Donut Days at her elementary school tucked inside our little Plaza neighborhood. It would mean more science projects, like the one where we bought a half-dozen brands of microwave popcorn to see which ones had the most/fewest unpopped kernels. It would mean hundreds of afternoons walking her home from school with her backpack slung over our shoulder and our young dog Jimmy bounding along ahead of us.

"June 13," she said. As in three weeks and one day from now.

That's not enough time. Not nearly. Three weeks and one day will go by as quickly as this sentence. Bam, period, full stop.

You can purr platitudes at us all day: The best years are still coming, the most rewarding part of being a parent is seeing your children all grown up, the blah blah, yakkity yakkity yak ...

We recall talking to a therapist once, who held his hands in one of those therapeutic steeple shapes while musing, "Do you think the fact that your children are growing up could be a contributing factor in your depression? "

"Contributing" might be too weak a word, otherwise, Bingo, Doc. I see that our time is up.

But not before he did the "best years are ahead" riff.

We don't buy it. The best years are sleeping on the floor of your child's room when she or he has the flu or a fever. The most rewarding part is scuffling around in the kitchen, still 90 percent asleep, scrambling eggs or making smoothies or dropping a couple of frozen waffles in the toaster and getting the kids' clothes out and ready and strapping them in the car and singing snippets of Disney songs and quizzing them on what movie they're from.

Our son, Ray, six years older than his sister, ran point through all these milestones. We still remember holding a video camera tighlty against our crying eyes at the kindergarten graduation as the little kids sang "It's a Hoopity-Hey Kind of Day." Good Lord, that was a crushing day. Hearing those kids sing "Hoopity Hey" made "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" sound like "The Beer Barrel Polka. "

So, yeah, three weeks and one day before we sit with our wife and son on cold alumnium seats at Millikan's football field, holding a video camera, a newish one that's too small to cover our face, waiting for a thousand graduating students to pomp and circumstroll to their seats.